The process of fighting in itself is a win
It’s how we assert our shared humanity
Kim Kelly joins us today to talk to Eric Blanc about his new book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big.
Most recently she wrote for Hell World back in July about speeches by UAW President Shawn Fain at Netroots Nation and Teamsters President Sean O’Brien at the Republican National Convention.
Luke O’Neil
More from me afterwards.
It’s how we assert our shared humanity
by Kim Kelly
Eric Blanc spends a lot of time thinking about unions. For one thing, it’s his job; he’s an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, where his research focuses on new workplace organizing, strikes, digital labor activism, and working-class politics. Blanc’s first book, Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics came out in 2019, and his writing regularly pops up in places like Jacobin, The Nation, New Labor Forum, and more.
As if that wasn’t enough, he spends whatever free time he can scrounge up working with organizing projects like the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, which trains and supports workers who want to unionize their workplaces, and the Worker to Worker Collaborative, a newer initiative from Rutgers and EWOC that aims to build union power via worker-to-worker organizing. That all dovetails nicely with his new book, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, which sees Blanc utilize his deep experience as an organizer, historian, and labor activist to break down exactly why the worker-to-worker model is so effective—and why organized labor needs to double down on the strategy if we want to confront (and survive) this current political moment.
Maybe you could start just by briefly laying out the big argument of We Are the Union?
On a really basic level, one core argument of the book is that you can and should unionize your workplace. So I include a bunch of inspiring stories about ordinary people taking on and beating the bosses — and throughout the book I include a bunch of “how to” tips for building power at work.
But the broader strategic argument of the book is that to win at scale — to unionize tens of millions and transform America — we need a new organizing model, because traditional staff-intensive organizing is too costly to scale. Normally you need about 1 staff for every 100 workers you’re trying to organize, and it costs about $3,000 to organize every new worker. But recent successful unionization drives at Starbucks, across journalism, in auto and beyond, show that a new scalable model, worker-to-worker unionism, is possible and necessary. The defining attribute of this model is that it relies far less on staff, and that workers take on many of the tasks normally done by full-timers, such as training worker leaders, initiating campaigns, and strategizing.
And while I wrote the book before Trump took office, I’d add here that the argument is even more relevant now in relation to all the big fight-backs against Trump and Musk. Because the federal unions and all these other big unions frankly don’t have the number of staff necessary to organize millions of workers to beat back DOGE’s coup and to save all our services. So it’s been up to rank-and-file, worker-to-worker efforts like the Federal Unionists Network to take the lead.
It's not exactly a secret that workers want to join unions and that organizing is important. And we have these big unions with big organizing departments that have paid organizers on staff. And yet millions of workers in this country who want to join unions are not in them. So one might ask: What is the disconnect there? Why aren't we seeing a massive prioritization of organizing from unions that already have these resources?
Unfortunately the labor movement is extremely risk averse and beset by deep inertia. So even in the amazing organizing opportunity and effervescence that emerged in the wake of the pandemic, as so many workers started self-organizing from below, it's really remarkable how little the labor movement leadership pivoted. They kept on doing business as usual. The big wins we've had the last few years have generally been won despite the lack of a pivot from the top union leadership to new organizing. And it's frankly kind of maddening because labor is currently sitting on over $35 billion in net assets that it’s not using.
Labor union leaderships are mostly convinced that you can't scale up and you can't fight back and win as long as the US legal terrain is so inhospitable. And it's true — even before Trump took back office — that the legal terrain here is very hard for unionizing. Organizing is a real challenge, it's a real risk, you're not guaranteed to win. But doing nothing will guarantee continued decline. And we’re never going to see labor law reform (and I’m not sure we’ll be able to undermine MAGA’s hold on so many working people) unless a big unionization uptick pushes unionization back to the center of American politics.
At the same time, it seems like a lot of the union leaderships are going to now say that since Trump’s in office, we shouldn’t be putting resources into organizing. And I think even lots of people in the rank-and-file and the public are also probably genuinely wondering whether labor organizing can fight under such a hostile administration. What would you say to them?
Personally, I think that worker-to-worker organizing is going to be an even more pivotal tool under the current administration because nobody from above is going to come and save us against this billionaire power grab. Democratic leaders are just completely MIA, most union leaders remain flatfooted (though hopefully that’s starting to change), and so the way we defeat Trumpism has to be self-organization from below. Who else is going to do it if not working people?
And I think, paradoxically, by filling this political vacuum, labor can actually increase its momentum and organization even as it is obliged to wage mostly defensive battles for the moment. Because what Musk is doing with these cuts to services — including now openly talking about privatizing Social Security — is just extremely unpopular. Who’s going to send out your Social Security checks if DOGE fires half the SSA workforce like they indicated? Even large numbers of Republican voters are not on board with this.
So I would say that labor actually has a historic opportunity to prevent Trump’s authoritarian regime from consolidating itself. But the crucial thing is what unions and groups like the Federal Unionists Network do over the next few months to get hundreds of thousands and millions of people into the street to defend federal workers and federal services, to stop Musk. They set up a website — savepublicservices.com — for folks to sign up to get notified of local actions against Musk (and, if they’re interested, to sign up to join the movement.) I don't think Trump is as powerful as he wants us to believe he is and I think that the extent of his overreach is potentially paving the way for a real social explosion from below. But workers and unions have to get into war footing ASAP to make that happen.
I want to touch on something in the book that really stood out to me and I think was present in a bunch of the campaigns that you've mentioned, from the Amazon Labor Union to Starbucks, and that’s the importance of fun and of socializing. Can you speak more about the joy of coming together with your co-workers and how it fits into this model more broadly?
I think that the joy piece is especially important in worker-to–worker organizing because if you are going to organize without much staff support, it really does take up a lot of time and at times can be a slog. Labor organizing is often a lot of one-on-one conversations with co-workers; it isn’t always the exciting things like striking. But precisely because there are all these really hard parts, you do need some fun to keep up momentum and to sustain you. And oftentimes you need to socialize with your coworkers because in today’s conditions — unlike a century ago — people are much more atomized and we don’t necessarily know our co-workers, and go out for drinks with them after work, or go to the same church or whatever. So building that personal relationship — doing a potluck, playing video games together, whatever — it does really make a big difference. And when you have those relationships, it’s far easier to get everyone on the same page to fight the boss.
I might be showing a bit of my my partisanship here but I want to talk just for a little bit about the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] because when we're talking about worker-to-worker organizing, we're talking about a tradition that goes all the way back to the Wobblies a century ago, right? And I think we have a lot to learn from them. Especially because they rose up in an era before labor law was passed in the 1930s, and we might soon be on similar terrain again. I’m so curious about how you see the IWW model and how, or if, it fits into the model you’re describing.
I definitely see the argument I'm making here as in line with a really long standing tradition going back to the Wobblies, a tradition saying that workers should be in the drivers’ seat of the labor movement. In that sense, I'm trying to make a new case for an old argument, to tap that old spirit but to adopt it for today’s conditions (which in many ways are very different than a century ago.)
That said, I do think I diverge on a couple of things with the Wobblies: I think that in today's conditions against these really big companies you really do need a lot of resources (including from staffers) and I think there's general reluctance in the Wobblies tradition about the utility of affiliating with bigger established unions and of having any full-time staff. What I try to show in the book is that a synthesis is possible between that bottom-up, militant Wobbly spirit, with the institutional might of these big unions that really have the money and the extra capacity to help workers win big. Starbucks Workers United, for example, has shown what this looks like: workers are still in the leadership and driving things, but they're backed by Workers United and SEIU. Of course, there are tensions there in navigating that relationship, it’s not super easy, but I think it’s a productive and necessary tension if we’re going to take on the most powerful companies in the world and unionize millions.
One of the things I like about your book is that it really provides a grounded-but-hopeful message. And since the times we’re in are pretty bleak, I was hoping you could end by saying what gives you political hope at this moment?
I take solace in the fact that things can change very quickly. Oftentimes they change for the worse, of course, but if you look throughout history it's just always the case that almost everybody is surprised when you have eruptions of worker militancy. And we’re starting to see that again today. If you had asked me a couple of months ago I wouldn't necessarily have expected this amount of federal worker organizing against Trump to have emerged already.
It’s bad that so many people on our side are doom-pilled, although I get it. Like everybody else, I’ve had moments of horrible despair at the state of things. But it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if you think nothing can be done, because if that’s your assumption then you're not ever going to organize and fight back and then truly nothing gets better. In turn if you do maintain some sort of grounded hope, that tends to help spur you to fight back.
And I think it’s worth remembering, you know, people have fought back and won in a lot harder circumstances than we’re in today. You know as bad as things are right now, I think about what it was like organizing under Jim Crow. That was, by any measure, an authoritarian regime. People were getting murdered for fighting for just basic democratic rights. Similarly, hundreds and hundreds of workers literally lost their lives fighting the bosses before union rights were accepted in the 1930s. So we have a responsibility I think to rise to this moment. And I’d just say on a personal note, that I also feel less depressed when I'm organizing. I’ve been working round the clock these past two months to support the federal workers and it turns out that when you’re organizing all day, you don’t have much time to worry. And when you’re surrounded by comrades you don't have to absorb all of the horrors of the world individually.
It’s definitely exhausting, but there's something special about participating collectively and diving into the fight that just gives you a sense of peace knowing that you're doing everything you can to keep these asshole billionaires from destroying our country and from destroying the world. And as we talked about before, organizing is often a very joyful, empowering experience. And so that phrase we often say “When We Fight, We Win,” it's not saying necessarily that the immediate outcome of the battle is always a victory. What it’s saying on a deeper level is that the process of fighting in itself is a win. It’s how we assert our shared humanity against some of the worst, most powerful people on the planet.
Kim Kelly is a freelance labor journalist and author of two books on radical labor history, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor and the forthcoming young readers version, Fight to Win! Heroes of American Labor, which is now available for preorder.
I am not going to lie to you nice people I am not doing well. On top of everything else now I have fucked up elbow to deal with too. Turns out you need your elbows to write. To do so many things! How are you holding up though? What are you doing to stay sane or to fight back or build community or whatever else? Let me know if you like and I'll probably print the responses in an upcoming issue.
Paid subscribers can keep reading for some of the best things I read this week, some new music picks, a little Severance talk, and one of the grossest plates of food I've ever seen!
As always your support of this newsletter is greatly appreciated.
I am being so serious right now please tell me what I am looking at in this photo ->